High-tech haven in Canandaigua

MEMS technology. It is the stuff of airbags, hearing aids and smart phones. It is the technology happening at the former Infotonics Technology Center, now operating under a parent organization connected with SUNY Albany that has 300 corporate partners.

When a former Xerox cleanroom facility at 5450 Campus Drive off Route 332 in Canandaigua became the promised headquarters of this technology in 2004 under the name Infotonics Technology Center, it came with much fanfare: Officials touted government grants, business tax breaks and sure-fire job creation. It also raised eyebrows — for good reason. The facility that had billed itself a $130 million research center giving financial and technological support system to entrepreneurs and startups seemed to go belly-up in the summer of 2008. Those in the know were tight-lipped about a mass shakeup that ended in resignations and terminations of top Infotonics executives.

“Lo and behold, Infotonics just disappeared and we wondered how many millions of dollars were wasted,” said Joe Nacca, a retired associate professor of English who lives in Canandaigua.

Canandaigua Town Supervisor Sam Casella, whose job as director of government relations at Infotonics was terminated in 2008, said recently he thinks Infotonics crumbled because it didn’t have enough government backing. The concept was sound, he said, but there wasn’t enough money to support the vision. Now, under Gov. Andrew Cuomo and a new structure, Casella said he believes it will thrive.

The UAlbany CNSE is the first college in the world dedicated to education, research, development and deployment in science and engineering done at the nanoscale (that would be one to 100 nanometers — one nanometer is a billionth of a meter).

After a presentation by STC’s manager of government and community affairs, David Gottfried, chamber president Alison Grems said she recalled community sentiment during the Infotonics days when mentioning the Infotonics Center evoked comments such as, “Oh, that never came to fruition.”

Taking the Messenger on a tour of STC a few weeks ago, Paul Tolley, STC’s executive director, said he was brought on board in December 2008 “to turn the center around.”

“I didn’t want the community to lose this asset,” said Tolley, who lives in Brighton with his wife, Kristen and their three children. He said the merger marked a turning point and STC is set for success, whereas Infotonics was not. “With Infotonics, there was no long-term vision,” he said. “Infotonics made promises with no plan.” Tolley added it was focused on startups, “and startups don’t have money.”

He talked about how the center now has an established, well-funded parent organization in UAlbany CNSE that has more than 300 corporate partners. Tolley gave an example, saying $5 billion is coming from several corporate partners including IBM, Intel and Samsung. “Companies want to invest here,” Tolley said. “We don’t invest in anybody. People pay us to be here.”

Tolley responded to questions in a conversation and private tour of the facility April 17:

Q. What companies are currently housed at STC and what do they do?

Group4Labs developed and makes commercially available a semiconductor wafer that allows transistor and laser operations under extreme conditions.

Q. How many employees are working in each of these companies at the center, and what types of jobs are these?

Group4Labs has four to six employees; Carestream, 20; Moser Baer, 17-18; Dynamax Imaging LLC is expected to bring in 16-18 by the end of this year. The jobs are mostly all highly-trained technicians, scientists and engineers.

Q. How many employees work directly for STC and were they hired from a local pool of applicants (as opposed to workers who relocated from other facilities or came from outside the area)?

The STC has 45 employees and last week was advertising to fill five positions that are mostly technicians and engineers. Most of STC’s employees lived in the Rochester/Finger Lakes area when they were hired.

Q. Who owns the building at 5450 Campus Drive? What is the arrangement with companies using the building, and what’s the deal with taxes?

Management Corp. The property is assessed at $8 million; it encompasses a 140,000-square-foot building on 10 acres and an additional 47 surrounding vacant acres. Because the property is classified as an education and research facility, STC is fully exempt from property taxes. Those property taxes that include school, town and county amount to about $224,000 annually.

Q. The governor said the recent move of Dynamax Imaging to STC will bring STC to “full capacity.” What does this mean, and how soon is STC expected to be “full?”

STC currently has agreements with about 18 different companies who pay to use the facility.

Dynamax announced this year it will install more than $3 million in equipment and establish 100 jobs at STC over the next three to five years. There are no plans to expand the building at the Canandaigua property, though other locations in the Rochester region are being discussed as possible sites for expansion.

Q. How much in government money has been granted to enterprises/projects at STC to date and what are the funding sources?

Since the merger in 2010, $40 million has been invested in the center, with 80 percent of that from private companies.

(Tolley gave an example of the funding formula with Moser Baer: Total project cost is $27 million. Of that, $20 million is from Moser Baer, with state and federal dollars matching the remaining $7 million.)